I have always wanted a mentor. What I mean to say by that is that I have always wanted someone, some writer, older and more accomplished than myself to take a real interest in my work and help me on my journey. It always felt like academia was the correct avenue to take to find this person. I figured that maybe I would have some professor that singled me out, saw something in me, and pushed me in the way I needed to be pushed. I felt like other people had this. And things I’ve read, introductions to novels by a former student of the author, people I’d talked to, these people had someone. They would go over to their mentor’s house for drinks and conversation, for private workshops or private group workshops for the initiated, have someone they could call on then or in the future if they had a question, needed an opinion, or just needed some encouraging words. Although I’ve definitely had people help me along the way, the whole mentor thing just never worked itself out for me. And now it feels like the moment to acquire that help, that idea, that feeling… it feels like that moment is forever lost.

What I mean can be summed up, I think, in Michelle Latiolais’ introduction to John Williams’ recently reprinted (thanks to the New York Review of Books) novel Butcher’s Crossing. In her opening paragraph, she reflects on her meeting of Williams:

In 1981 I began my graduate studies with John Williams at the University of Denver, where he had taught since 1954. After my first workshop, he came to my office — almost completely obscured by the stack of books he carried; he was not at all a tall man — and he set them on my desk. “Ignore all of what you just heard and sat through. Read these authors. They will be your teachers. You’re a writer who can’t be taught, who has to figure it out on her own.”

She goes on to say, being dumbstruck by Williams’ move, “I was used to simpering in doorways during office hours until a professor deigned to look up from his papers and acknowledge me.” This was, despite Williams’ admission that Latiolais “couldn’t be taught” and should instead look to other authors for tutelage, was a mentor presenting himself. It was him bringing her in to some private circle, baptizing her with a certain friendship that many of us don’t get to experience. Many of us are, instead, those simpering in doorways waiting to be noticed but never truly acknowledged.

I’ve had some great teachers along the way, people I call my mentors but who never truly were that exactly. In my undergraduate studies I had Arthur Athanason, an animated and passionate man who loved literature and, particularly, theatre and playwriting. Often he would work himself up so thoroughly that he, despite his small stature, would get red in the face and scream at his enthralled audience; “People! It means she was fucking the aristocracy!” or “If you haven’t read it, people — please, treat yourself!” or he would simply jump on his desk and act out an equine orgasm from Peter Shaffer’s Equus. No one could simultaneously play both Stanley and Blanche from A Streetcar Named Desire like him. He was not a professor you could fool, especially when it came to emotion, and he was never an easy ‘A’. I had Dr. Athanason for two courses, Introduction to Creative Writing and Playwriting; he was also my thesis advisor.

But despite the long hours of work I put in for him and the many hours I spent in his office talking about my writing, I never felt like he had a real interest in me. As soon as I left his office, it was over. I never felt a real kinship with him; after all, it was me who sought him out. He was an institution in himself, someone who you would definitely have heard of had you took the creative writing path at my alma mater. His classes were always full, always with a waiting list. But after I left my university, I never spoke to him again as it didn’t really feel like my place. He died a few years ago from pancreatic cancer and that was that. I wish I could have spoken to him before he died, or even attended his funeral, but then again… who was I?

I thought about Dr. Athanason recently because I’ve been thinking about this idea of having a mentor for a while. After a couple of drinks one night, I decided I would seek out his one book on Amazon: Endgame: The Ashbin Play. This book is a short thesis on Samuel Beckett’s play Endgame, and since I’ve only just received it I have yet to read it. Flipping through the pages, however, it feels like it might just be a compulsory overview of the play with some analysis — the general academic treatment. But I hope against hope that it produces some nuggets of Athanason’s wisdom, his incredible emotional intelligence, and perhaps some of his verbal foibles imploring you to “treat yourself.”

In graduate school I worked closely with another professor, an accomplished author, Stephen Wright. Wright is the author of a number of “cult” books (meaning, although he’s incredibly talented, no one ever really noticed) including Meditations in Green, M31: A Family Romance, and The Amalgamation Polka. Here is another case in which I sought out the person who I felt might make a good mentor. Wright is a cool, counter-culture kind of aging-rebel; always clad in a leather biker jacket, tinted glasses, and a baseball cap, complete with hand tattoos and facial piercings. Picture this on a man who could be a grandfather. He always had disparaging things to say about the publishing industry or critics, not in a way demonstrating bitterness necessarily but more with a realist-cum-defeatist attitude. He was right about most stuff, unfortunately, and he turned me on to some really great authors. To say he didn’t have a huge effect on my writing would be a complete lie; without him, I wouldn’t be even close to what I am capable of today. However, it’s over now. Wright’s telephone number is in my contacts and has made the transition from three different phones. But I won’t ever call him. I just don’t feel like I should.

Dr. Athanason would probably say I’m in search of a father figure, of a literary father figure, and maybe he would be right. But it didn’t work out with him nor did it work out with Wright. There’s some disconnect with these people. Like my experience with Athanason, I had two classes with Wright and he was my thesis advisor. But after all was finished, after I matriculated, those relationships ended. I understand that teachers have a difficult time truly connecting with students, after all they have so many pass through them over the years. And maybe neither of these men saw the spark in me, or saw what they felt to be the spark, or maybe neither of them had the time, the energy, or the desire to pass anything on, to help be a part of the next generation. I wrote a one-act play once for Dr. Athanason saying all this, pitting a young writer against an aging professor who never really gave him notice. “Look at me now,” the young writer was eventually able to say, on the eve of his success. “You ignored me then but now you can’t possibly ignore me.” Athanason saw right through this, as I knew he would, and he said to me, “So did you say what you had to say to me?” I did; it still felt like it fell on deaf ears.

On Becoming a Novelist by John Gardner is a book I revisit every couple of years because it’s so powerful and speaks to who I feel I am as a writer. The introduction to this book was written by Raymond Carver, a writer who needs no introduction himself. One passage that strikes me, and easily accompanies the aforementioned connection Michelle Latiolais had with John Williams, is when Carver narrates his experience meeting and studying under Gardner:

Gardner had become aware of my difficulty in finding a place to work. He knew I had a young family and cramped quarters at home. He offered me the key to his office. I see that gift now as a turning point. It was a gift not made casually, and I took it, I think, as a kind of mandate — for that’s what it was.

Picturing this, Raymond Carver getting the key to John Gardner’s office, is almost heartbreaking. Did Gardner see something in Carver that Carver had yet to see in himself? Why Carver? This was, mind you, before Carver had really done anything — he was just starting out. What did Carver have or what did Gardner see that has always felt so distant from me?

Things are much different now. University English and writing programs are huge, there are so many of them, that the idea of a professor seeking out a student in need is diametrically opposed to what reality can offer. If you’ve yet to read it or it fell under your radar, take a look at the recent article We Need to Acknowledge the Realities of Employment in the Humanities by Peter Conn in the Chronicle of Higher Education to see just how awfully unwieldy life has become in academia for the professor and student. While this article doesn’t touch on my subject necessarily, I think it paints a pretty good picture of why almost no professor in academia has time to really mentor any particular student anymore. And though academia probably won’t hurt the aspiring writer, it’s a much colder place overall than the previous examples I’ve given seem to convey of times past.

I’ve found my own way. I once thought I wanted the life of a professor in which maybe I could provide mentorship to a student and live the “easy” life of a college teacher. But if my time spent in academia has taught me anything, if Conn’s article has pointed out the realities, and if the frightening idea of the insulated academia-infused writer who writes only about being a writer hasn’t scared me away, I think it’s probably best for myself, and for my work, to stay away from that life, to live like one of the regulars, and to be true to myself. I can just be my own mentor.

I never thought about what books I’d want with me on a desert island until I found myself on one when I moved to New Zealand last year.

Only kidding. Technically, New Zealand is two desert islands separated by a narrow strait.

But the point is, as my wife and I prepared to pick up shop from New York to her native Auckland, we had some reckoning to do. With a fixed budget, how do you decide what books are worth the cost in freight to ship overseas?

The selection process made me want to puke. It triggered an anxiety I usually associate with “top-ten” lists, where the prospect of having not read someone’s favorite title indicated an essential deficit to my education, taste or intellect.

Like when the New York Times published its top-25 list of “best” American fiction from the previous quarter century, I remember ticking off the titles I’d owned or read (Independence Day by Richard Ford? Yeeaah, boy) while castigating myself over those that I’d missed (Housekeeping by Marilynne Robinson, what moron could have missed that?)

But why should I care what fiction the Times decided was “best”? What programmatic cross section of the reading population in America was I desperate to affiliate myself with, anyway?

I don’t know. But because I sometimes think that way, I began to wonder about the value I placed on my books and why I owned any of them in the first place.

Did I really like The Savage Detectives? Or did I think I did because some abstract authority or institution or strategic placement in Barnes and Noble made me believe I should? Did I prominently display my copy on the off-chance that a dipshit like myself would come to my apartment, browse the shelves and say, “Hey, you read Roberto Bolano just like me. High five.”

Uh…maybe.

Anyway, we decided. We packed some of our books, and the rest we sold or placed in small piles on the stoop in front of our apartment day after day. Each pile disappeared immediately and sometimes strangers would stop us on the street and ask when there’d be more.

By the time we finally got to New Zealand, I’d forgotten what books we’d packed. It was good enough just to have these familiar, tangible objects from back home regardless of whether my rationale for owning them was “pure” or from vanity or just some inexplicable neurosis.

There was my 16 year old copy of The Odyssey, for example, one of the few fictional works of length that I’ve read more than twice, which I must have brought over because I could never figure why Penelope never filed for divorce.

Then there was A Distant Mirror, Barbara Tuchman’s amazing history of the “calamitous 14^th century” with its endless war and incredible gap between the noblemen and the serfs, I guess because sometimes it’s nice to see how far humanity has progressed. I bought that book 12 years ago, when I needed stimulation living alone in a sleepy upstate New York village and the local hoodlums wouldn’t sell me pot.

Then there was Being and Time by Martin Heidegger, because sometimes one of the legs on your dining room table is six inches shorter than the other three.

Then there was the bulk of the Aubrey-Maturin Series by Patrick O’Brian, because my grandmother is such a fan and she gave them to me and I’ve only read the first three volumes so far and I’m afraid that if I don’t read the rest she’ll pull my ears.

There was also A Form/Of Taking/It All by Rosmarie Waldrop because I had so much fun in Shelley Jackson’s class at New School, and Castle to Castle because I had an interesting argument about reality in Ben Taylor’s, and I want to feel like my MFA was worth the price.

And there was my ancient copy of The Soft Machine collaged over by my friend from art school who broke my heart, and the collection of essays by Murray Kempton from the friend whose heart I broke, and a ragged old Blood Meridian from a friend who is still my friend and missed.

And there was The Metamorphoses because you can’t make that shit up, and a volume of the Gnostic Gospels because what else am I going to read in the toilet?

And there was Watt because it once belonged to my late father and I wondered if he’d ever read it himself, and besides, what is funnier than Watt? And Sixty Stories, because what is funnier than Sixty Stories? And a history of the Battle of Brooklyn because that was what I was reading in the Brooklyn pub where I first befriended my wife 225 years after George Washington retreated to a sleepy village upstate where none of the hoodlums would sell him hemp.

And then, at last, there was Francine Prose’s Reading Like a Writer, because one of these days her list of books “to be read immediately” won’t make me feel so anxious anymore.

If there’s one thing I think all writers have in common it’s that they are full of themselves. Every writer you’ll encounter has the answer for you, whatever your question might be, because they are an authority on the subject at hand. This comes from long hours spent reading books on esoteric subjects, studying whatever has grabbed their interest that particular day, and the fact that writers, on the most basic level, are hungry for any information that could prove to be inspirational to them. In our modern times, we are lucky to have a repository like Wikipedia. What writer out there hasn’t spent hours reading articles on Wikipedia, clicking through links to take them to related subjects, sometimes ending a far leap in topic from where they began. Sometimes, I’ll look up to the Wikipedia searchbar in my browser and have no recollection of searching for the topic that still resides there. But ultimately, all this information we absorb is because we are striving to become an authority on everything. Ask my friends: I always have the answer for any question presented. Whether that answer is the correct one is another story, but I will always have something to say.

I mention this idea of the Writer’s Ego having just finished reading John Fante’s Ask The Dusk. Our protagonist in this novel is Arturo Bandini, an aspiring writer who has moved to Los Angeles to find his fame. What struck me as real, and very funny, is how full of himself Bandini is. In the preface to the edition I read (pictured above), Charles Bukowski, a writer obviously and admittedly inspired by Fante, states this very same amusement. When having a fight with his wife, Bukowski would summon Fante’s egotistical writer and scream, “Don’t call me a son of a bitch! I am Bandini, Arturo Bandini!” Throughout the novel, Bandini speaks to himself of his own genius and talent, often referring to the one story he has published and how fantastic it is. “I wonder if he’s handsome, that Bandini fellow, author of that brilliant Little Dog Laughed.”

Bandini wavers at times, allowing his self-esteem to plummet when things don’t go precisely the way he hopes. But he always returns to a booming ego, talking himself up, praising himself to himself. It’s Bandini this, Bandini that… how could you treat Bandini like this, the Arturo Bandini, author of the Little Dog Laughed and the Long Lost Hills? At one point in the novel, after beating himself up over soiling the good morals of a woman (in his own mind at least) by sleeping with her, it happens that an earthquake strikes the city. In a lesser work, a character might simply take the earthquake as some sort of portent and reflect on life. But to Arturo Bandini, he himself is solely responsible for the earthquake and any death it causes.

Now there were screams. Then dust. Then crumbling and roaring. I turned round and round in a circle. I had done this. I had done this. I stood with my mouth open, paralyzed, looking about me. I ran a few steps toward the sea. Then I ran back.

You did it, Arturo. This is the wrath of God. You did it.

Fante has distilled the Writer’s Ego down to an extremely comical, yet entirely believable character with Arturo Bandini. While Bandini’s story is not without its sadness, throughout Ask The Dust we are shown the writer as center of the universe, the writer as arrogance personified. Even when Bandini puts himself down, or purports modesty or temperance, it is to feed the wild ego that exists at his very core. “How wonderful I really was! A great, soft-spoken, gentle man, a lover of all things, men and beast alike.”

The writer develops such an ego, I believe, because writing itself is such a solitary exercise. When one spends so much time searching one’s own mind for clues about life’s truths, it’s only natural that they will start to believe all their answers are golden. And really, anybody who thinks that people will hungrily devour any words they put to a page must be suffused with ego. Why you? Why your words and not somebody else’s? It’s because you are Arturo Bandini, author of the Little Dog Laughed, great genius of our time, a writer for the ages! Being writers, we’ve all got a little bit of Arturo Bandini in us and there’s nothing wrong with that… you’ve got to be a little crazy, a little wild with ego, to succumb to being an artist of any stripe. A writer would suffer, I think, without such an ego; if you can’t stand behind your work, if you try to please everyone else over yourself, you’ll never find your voice. And maybe that’s what we’re really talking about when we talk about a writer’s voice, the voice of their ego, and when we find it we have finally allowed our ego to surface with all the good and bad it brings. A writer’s true charge is to harness that ego, to allow it to flourish without thinking our actions caused a natural disaster, to know what it is that we do not know… and to find those answers. “Bandini, the idiot, the dog, the skunk, the fool. But I couldn’t help it.“

It’s one of the most dreaded scenarios that you can ever encounter.  You’re at some social function, a birthday dinner or a cocktail party, and everyone you meet is, well…smarter than you.  It isn’t like you’re an idiot or anything; you just want to have a conversation about the latest episode of Jersey Shore and all everyone wants to talk about is J.D. Salinger (who just died or something) and keeps mentioning Catcher in the Rye.  And you think baseball is boring, so you never read it and everyone gives you looks of pity and disgust.  Thankfully, with these helpful rules and advice, you’ll never have to suffer through such an experience ever again.  You’ll know how to act well read.

You don’t have to actually read the books, just about them.

Reading books takes time and concentration, and you have neither.  You can look up the plots to classic titles on Wikipedia, flip through the New York Times Book Review to learn about the latest releases, and cruise through bookstores every now and then to read the backs of random books.  This will give you just enough material to work with in conversation; you’ll be able to list main characters and themes along with the settings and main plot points or two.  Oh, and NEVER use the movie version of a book as the source of reference—Hollywood changes everything, including endings.

Be part of the conversation.

People who don’t know what’s being talked about don’t participate in the conversation.  Think about when you were a little kid and your parents talked about politics or world events over dinner—you didn’t add to the discussion because you knew nothing about it.  This is also the riskiest part of pretending to be well read.  You’re in danger of exposing yourself as not knowing what the hell you’re talking about, because…well, you don’t.  Hopefully, if you followed the previously mentioned step, you’ll have enough to work with.  The rest of these rules will help you survive the discussion.

Never admit to not knowing an author.

So, you’ve waded into the conversation and, despite your research, someone mentions a writer you’ve never heard before.  Don’t ask, “Who’s that?”  It does seem a little obvious, but even those that actually read a lot break this rule.  Remain passive when a novelist you’re not familiar with is being praised (Though a nod every now and then along with an affirmation of “Yeah, he’s good,” doesn’t hurt.) And if asked directly whether you’ve read a specific title of his work, respond with “I’ve only read his short fiction.”

Agree with whoever actually read the book and don’t ask questions.

“I pretended to read many books back in college,” my friend Jane admits, “but I definitely don’t remember how I pulled it off other than agreeing with the individuals and laughing when they were saying, ‘and do you remember the crazy part when so and so did this and that?’”  It goes without saying that if someone is recounting what happened in a book you haven’t read, you should just go along with what they’re saying. But there is the temptation to take it too far and expose yourself with just one little logical assumption (that turns out to be false) or too much praise.  Something a book publicist friend (who wishes to remain anonymous, for obvious reasons) found out the hard way. “I told the author I was so glad his book had a happy ending,” she says, “and he replied, ‘The main character gets shoved through a woodcutter.’ Whoops.”  Which brings us to out final rule…

Stick to what you know for sure.

So you’ve done your research, joined the conversation, haven’t admitted to not knowing any writer-y names thrown around, and are agreeing with everything being said—and it’s working.  You may feel like the greatest con artist the world has ever known and cocky enough to try and make something up—DON’T.  It’s a classic mistake; just stick to what you know.   “When talking about books I try to stick to books that are based on real events,” explains my friend Sean.  “Especially events in which I know how they worked out, i.e. the Titanic, civil war, you get the picture.  This way I can talk about the book by talking about what happened.”

Using my system, you’ll be able to navigate any conversation with a bibliophile with the greatest of ease.  Now, some critics may argue that truly being a “well read” person is not about the amount of reading you’ve done, but more about being open to discovering new books and writers.  They’ll even go so far as to say that discussions about books shouldn’t be to “prove” what you’ve read, but rather what you haven’t. They’ll say that you have to rise above your ego and freely admit what you don’t know, so as to discover and share books and authors that can change lives.

But what do those people know? They don’t even know who Snooki is.

I have been meaning to write this post for a while now because it’s something I think about daily, something that has become unavoidable in my life. If you go back and read my post about getting an MFA, you’ll see that I don’t regret going to graduate school for writing or the loaned money that it cost me. But just because I don’t regret it, that doesn’t mean I’m content with the consequences. I know many people who made the choice to pursue a writing degree and are now completely underwater in loans with little hope of surfacing in the near future. To think that you’re going to spend the next ten or fifteen years paying the minimum payment, accruing compounded interest that will eventually double the original size of the loan, is something that, I think, can seriously hinder a young writer’s inspiration. True, writers throughout time have struggled financially and it could be argued that it positively influenced their work (Faulkner, for example). But their financial troubles were more along the lines of “how can I pay rent, how can I eat, how can I drink this month” and not “how am I going to do all that and pay $500 in student loans on top of it.” What it all comes down to is that young writers are doing themselves a great disservice by taking on so much debt and unless you have a hustle outside of writing that pays well, you may never get out of that debt.

Universities are learning what a great money-maker the MFA is, which is why more and more MFA programs start up every year. Despite the economic issues we’re having right now, it’s still incredibly easy for students to get loan money. This is a recipe for financial ruin. What’s even worse is that the demand is there for the MFA; search the internet and you will find blogs dedicated to people applying for an MFA, complete with stories of a young writer not being accepted year after year but wanting so bad to get an MFA that he or she will continue applying every year until they are finally admitted. You don’t think universities notice this? If there is a student willing to take out some loans to go to school for a degree that confers on you almost nothing (in a job possibility sense), universities will create a program to cater to that student to increase their revenue. I’m not trying to paint universities as demons, they do indeed want you to learn and expand yourself, but they are businesses first. Don’t ever forget that.

Very few writers actually make good money; writing should be about the words, not about any financial reward that comes from it. If you get into writing thinking you’ll earn a livable wage from it, enough to support a family and buy a house and have all the conveniences of modern life, you will be in for a surprise. Many people do make money from writing, but they are still a small percentage of the total pool of writers in existence who make nothing. Being successful in writing is hard enough, so don’t purposefully put another roadblock in your way in the form of debt. If I learned anything from my time in an MFA program it’s that your writing, the way you approach it and the places it can lead you, are wholly up to you. You don’t need to drop loads of cash that you don’t have to buy the time to write — you have that time to write right now.

I’m lucky. I have abilities outside of writing that allow me to earn a good living and as such I am taking an aggressive stance on repaying my student loans. I’ve reached a point where I just hate that I’m in debt, it makes me feel trapped, and I want to pay it off sooner than later. When I finally claw myself out of the hole that debt is, I know the air will be much cleaner and I will feel much more liberated. Why? Because I will have far fewer monthly bills, allowing me to instead spend that money on something worthwhile… like life.

This talk of Writer’s Poverty reminded me of Jessi’s post from a few months back questioning why aspiring writers don’t read more literary journals. This was quite a popular essay and even got us linked on the Huffington Post. In her entry Jessi speaks to the contradiction that literary journals want you to read their publications before submitting, but if a writer were to subscribe to all the journals to which he or she might want to submit they would go broke in the process. There is no possible way that every writer who submits to a journal could actually afford to read that journal.

I used to subscribe to a handful of journals, most notably the Paris Review and Zoetrope: All-Story. I ended my subscriptions because, essentially, the work they printed bored me. That’s not to say I was completely unimpressed by anything published in these magazines; I was, however, more often than not nonplussed about each issue as a whole. But I’m willing to give the whole thing another shot.

So I think I’m going to subscribe to some literary journals. I have, for a few years now, wanted to subscribe to The Sun. Every opportunity I’ve had to read one of their publications left me happy I had cracked their covers. It’s also a boon to their journal that they publish monthly and are completely ad-free. But beyond that, I’m not sure to which journals I want to subscribe. Ultimately, I’m looking for some cutting edge work that actually excites me. I’m fatigued by the “me-me-me” writing style about privileged and disaffected youth that seems to permeate the world of the modern short story, so any journal that publishes that kind of stuff is out. I’m also not a big fan of a magazine like the New Yorker… granted, they publish some really great journalism but I, however, am more interested in fiction. I think the New Yorker publishes very safe fiction. But I also don’t want to read stories aping some sort of post-modernist style that don’t really have anything to say; that screams to me safe masquerading as rebellious. So where, dear reader, should I look?

I’ve been dissatisfied with the novels I’ve been reading lately (Nightwood by Djuna Barnes and I’ve Been Down So Long, It Looks Like Up to Me by Richard Farina for two) and literary journals could be the perfect thing to read on my daily commute. I’m thinking of subscribing to maybe five different journals. Let’s count the Sun as number one. Four more to figure out.